In a recently published episode of the Modern Poetry in Translation podcast, Jhumpa Lahiri discusses self-translation with Khairani Barokka. Topics include her relationship to translation, language and poetry; differences between the process of self translating poetry versus prose.
You can listen to the podcast or read the transcript here: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/jhumpa-lahiri-speaks-to-khairani-barokka-on-self-translation-and-turning-to-poetry/
The talk "Emotional Response to Self-Translation. The Case of Jhumpa Lahiri" by Andrea Bergantino (Trinity College Dublin) is available on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJf45YilDnM&ab_channel=TrinityCentreforLiterary%26CulturalTranslation
Recently, Jhumpa Lahiri published her first self-translated novel Whereabouts. In an interview with Urmila Seshagiri for Los Angeles Review of books she reflects on this experience:
"It becomes a hall of mirrors or an endless loop when you are at both ends. It’s like playing tennis with yourself but it’s not against the wall. It’s like hitting the ball and then running over to the other side, lobbing it back, and then running back. It’s kind of impossible, but in some crazy cartoon version of life you can imagine someone doing that."
Also see this blog post.
In their April 2021 issue, Words Without Borders published a very interesting essay by Jhumpa Lahiri who recently published her first self-translated novel Dove mi trovo / Whereabouts. In her essay, she reflects on the process of deciding whether or not to translate the novel herself, the translation process, and how this self-translation will affect future editions of the original.
Here are three quotes of her very interesting reflections on self-translation:
"... self-translation is like one of those radioactive dyes that enable doctors to look through our skin to locate damage in the cartilage, unfortunate blockages, and other states of imperfection."
"Self-translation is a bewildering, paradoxical going backward and moving forward at once. There is ongoing tension between the impulse to plow ahead undermined by a strange gravitational force that holds you back."
"That original book, which now feels incomplete to me, stands in line behind its English-language counterpart. Like an image viewed in the mirror, it has turned into the simulacrum, and both is and is not the starting point for what rationally and irrationally followed."
To read the complete essay, please go visit the Words Without Border journal:
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/april-2021-where-i-find-myself-on-self-translation-jhumpa-lahiri
The Center for Science and Society at Columbia University is organizing an online event with the author and self-translator Jhumpa Lahiri on Tuesday, 6th October 2020 at 8 pm local time (2am CET). Registration is required but free: https://scienceandsociety.columbia.edu/events/jhumpa-lahiri-new-languagesold-worlds-self-translation
Pulitzer-Prize-winning author and translator Jumpha Lahiri writes in English and Italian. At first, she was reluctant to translate her own work, after translating a short-story for the New Yorker from Italian to English, she decided to give it a try with her next novel. Whereabouts will be published in English self-translation next year by Bloomsbury.
Links:
Event description by the organizers
New Languages/Old Worlds: the Self in Translation
Join novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, in a conversation about her experience as a self-described “linguistic exile”. As someone who grew up in the interface of two disparate languages, Jhumpa Lahiri has elected to read and write exclusively in a new one: Italian. Though her mother tongue was Bengali, she moved from London at the age of two to Rhode Island, and went on to conduct the entirety of her extensive education in English. Despite her academic background and the fact that almost all of her acclaimed literary achievements to date have been in English, she now only reads and writes in Italian and has said: “English denotes a heavy burdensome aspect of my past. I’m tired of it.” Ms. Lahiri will speak about her linguistic odyssey and her conscious and at times arduous adoption of an entirely new language.
"I’ve just written a new novel in Italian and so my energy will go towards translating that myself. [...] I recently translated one of my short stories into English, which appeared in The New Yorker a couple of months ago. I now have more of a sense of what it will involve to translate myself. But we’ll see. That was a very short story that I had written four years ago in Italian. It was ten pages long. Translating it into English was weird, but it was also brief. I don’t know what it will be like to translate a novel, but I feel that it’s important to try. If it doesn’t feel satisfying, I may have to reconsider the choice. Right now every project I’m doing has its own set of needs and I can’t really say until I’m inside of it how I feel about it."Please click here to read the full interview.
